A conservative candidate over-performing polls and surprising a nation? Sounds familiar — doesn’t it?
Brazil’s incumbent conservative President Jair Bolsonaro defied expectations in the country’s presidential election on Sunday and will now head for a runoff with his left-wing opponent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, commonly referred to as Lula.
This excerpt from a piece titled “Brazilians shocked as Bolsonaro’s strong election showing defies expectations” ran yesterday in The Guardian could have been written six years ago about Donald Trump in America. Yet, today we read about another right-wing candidate on another continent:
“Tears filled Beatriz Simões’s eyes as she digested Jair Bolsonaro’s startlingly strong performance in Sunday’s Brazilian election.
Hours earlier the 34-year-old publicist had been convinced a hope-filled dawn was coming with the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as Brazil’s next leader.
But as she stood outside São Paulo’s museum of art – where Lula had come to insist his fight for power was alive – Simões wept as she pondered how loved ones had helped Brazil’s far-right incumbent surpass the predictions of pollsters.
“How can it be that my friends, my relatives, people who know me – who know that I am a black woman – still support the kind of thing Bolsonaro supports?” Simões asked as she and three friends grappled with the far right’s seemingly profound grip on society.”
Further along in the piece, Maria Cristina Fernandes, a political commentator from the newspaper Valor Econômico speaks of the ideology of “Bolsonarismo,” saying that:
“The degree of conservatism they have managed to insert into congress is something permanent and will take a very long time to reverse.”
Fernandes believed the results revealed a troubling disconnect between how Brazil’s chattering classes and journalists viewed Bolsonaro, and how voters themselves felt. “The media and the whole world was outraged by Bolsonaro’s conduct and handling of the pandemic … [But] the people do not share our thoughts,” she said.
Sunday’s results highlight just the latest major screw-up by pollsters. Another article, this time an analysis, by The Guardian titled “Why did the Brazil election pollsters get Bolsonaro’s vote so wrong?” was also published yesterday and asks how the latest electoral surprise actually happened:
So what went wrong? Few surveys, to be fair, were more than a couple of points off in projecting Lula’s final score. But many were way off with Bolsonaro’s. Why did so many pollsters fail to capture the level of the far-right figurehead’s support?
Political polling is, notoriously, an uncertain business. Notable recent failures include Britain’s 2015 parliamentary election, when almost 50% of all polls over the six-week campaign showed Labour ahead, but the Conservatives won by seven points.
The next year, while half of all Brexit campaign polls had the vote to leave ahead, none of the British Polling Council’s seven members correctly forecast the final result (though several were within the margin of error). Remain was consistently overestimated.
Also in 2016, US pollsters called the popular vote right, with scores that were well within their margins of error – but failed to accurately predict the swing-state votes that would end up propelling Donald Trump into the White House.
Now that we’ve read what was said in The Guardian, here is my analysis.
Traditional values are seeing a resurgence from continent to continent, and the fight against the global liberal elites is only just beginning.
The global “left” has today invaded many institutions — let’s take academia as one example — which in turn has led to control of many elements of everyday life in our current system. Many cannot get ahead and have careers in industries such as business, government and media which control the globalized world without having first gone through an indoctrination factory commonly known as “higher education.”
Yet, the “educated” elite actually represent a very small percentage of the population. Everyday voters, the majority of them who do not fall within the “educated” (read: indoctrinated) class want to be spoken to as one of their own, not as part of a tiny echo chamber.
Right-wing candidates and campaigns do that fairly well and fairly often. The ones on the left do not.
I know this from first-hand experience of working for 14 months in the key presidential state of Iowa as a member of the Trump Victory staff in 2019 and 2020.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, I got into a (very rare for me) Facebook debate with a liberal acquaintance of mine who, although a native Kansan, was at the time a graduate student in Washington, D.C. Over the course of our exchange, she said something that is still emblazoned in my memory as clearly as if it happened yesterday. This exchange happened only several days after the election when recounts and ballot curing processes were still going on in several swing states such as Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania and Donald Trump could have still picked up enough electors to maintain the presidency despite losing the popular vote. After I articulated this point, my acquaintance told me to “get my head out of the spin room.” That is one of the most offensive things I have ever experienced in my life, as I had just dedicated over a year to moving halfway across the country to talk to swing voters day in and day out, and I saw firsthand the opinions of everyday Americans change or be uncovered by true grassroots efforts — not Beltway media coverage and political advertisements crafted by Washington insider consultants — the real proverbial “spin room.”
Drawing upon that personal experience — I can assume that parallels to my own anecdotal evidence exist not only in America but in other countries as well — and the same elites make similar mistakes in their electoral predictions and analysis.
A right-wing resurgence is appearing globally, and most of the time the elites and the media have been majorly shocked.
Last week, Italy elected Giorgia Meloni as prime minister as part of the right-wing coalition Brothers of Italy. Unfortunately, the global mainstream media didn’t hesitate to paint her as “far-right” despite the fact that she ran for office on a top-line ideology of “god, family and country.” The Guardian does also note in the aforementioned piece on polling that in the case of Meloni:
“Italy’s pollsters turned in a respectable performance, underestimating the final 26% winning score of the Brothers of Italy leader, Giorgia Meloni, by little more – on average – than one percentage point.”
Still — with polling — “It is the failures, however, that people remember.”
In the case of Brazil’s right-wing resurgence, the parallels between Bolsonaro and former President Donald Trump are so prevalent that Trump even endorsed Bolsonaro in the election via a video released after a rally Trump headlined in Michigan.
Trump has made his support of Bolsonaro known before — and in 2021 The Atlantic wrote that “By endorsing Bolsonaro, Trump is endorsing his own legacy.”
In part, that statement is true — but I think it goes much deeper than that. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 showed America and the world that the everyday people have power, not a small class of elites. That is truly the legacy of so-called “Trumpism” — and in the case of Brazil it has turned into “Bolsonarismo.”
One thing that we must get better at doing on the right is separating ideas from a cult of personality. Ironically the left is better than we are at this — and to compete year in and year out not only in America but around the world we as a “global right” must reclaim our ideology and control the narrative around it. Or else our opponents will define us and we can’t let them keep doing so. However, they are free to keep underestimating us. We will keep surprising them.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
READ NEXT: Biden Forgets Tragic Death of Republican Congresswoman >>
Wokesters and greenies, beware. A red wave is starting to cover the world. You pushed too hard and now the pendulum is swinging back.